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<\/a>Illustration by Mark Garrison<\/p><\/div>\n
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For millennia, humans led nomadic lives, largely as hunter-gatherers. Then, some 12,000 years ago, they began taking to settled agriculture. The rest\u2014literally\u2014is history. But for some cultures, migration remains a way of life. In the Kutch region, for instance, with its largely arid and saline interior, the concept of home<\/em> is diffuse for several migratory communities. The Rabari people, for example, can walk hundreds of kilometers to find pasture for their goats and sheep, with their kids\u2014livestock and human\u2014riding on inverted cots on the backs of camels. In some cases, entire villages may be found empty because inhabitants have moved to a city to trade. The Wagher way of life, too, is closely connected to the topography of the region of Kutch and the Mundra coast.<\/p>\n The shoreline\u2019s shallow gradient means that the difference between high and low tides is large, exposing the seabed for up to five kilometers when the tide is out. Mangroves serve as breeding grounds for fish, and the nutrients in the intertidal zone ensure a high density of marine life. The water is protected and placid, perfect for fishing from small boats or on foot. While living inland may seem incongruous for a community that survives on the sea, the choice of the Waghers to do so also speaks to their long and intimate relationship with the sea, of understanding its vagaries and the challenges of the coast. Their system of moving between the coast and inland villages seems to have developed due to a number of conditions particular to the region. The Kutch coast is vulnerable to powerful cyclones that could destroy more permanent structures, and the sea itself is in constant flux\u2014fish move, tides rise and fall, storms eat away at the shoreline\u2014so it pays to have bunders that can be moved with some ease.<\/p>\n September to May is the official fishing season. Families gather at the coastal bunders where they live in austere homes\u2014jute sackcloth draped over wood or bamboo frames\u2014assembled on the sand or mudflats, and without electricity, running water, or toilets. At low tide, their small boats\u2014often salvaged from the nearby shipbreaking center of Alang\u2014rest on the exposed seabed. When the tide comes in, the fishermen wade to their boats and set out. They spend a couple of hours diving in the water, laying and retrieving nets. They return with the catch\u2014prawns, pomfret, and plenty of Bombay duck, a type of lizardfish\u2014before the tide goes out again. At the bunder, women sort the catch and children help in hanging the Bombay duck on racks to dry.<\/p>\n At the Randh bunder near Bhadreshwar village, women collect dried Bombay duck, a type of lizardfish, for sale to wholesalers. Photo by Sami Siva<\/p><\/div>\n The entire settlement is dismantled after the fishing season when the Waghers return to their villages. The off-season is a time to make repairs to houses and nets, for weddings and family celebrations. But fishing continues throughout the year, albeit without boats. During the monsoon months, when fish are breeding and both traditional management and the fisheries department prohibit the use of boats, the Waghers live inland and go to the coast to fish pagadiya. Each fisherman installs a net on the seabed in the shape of a V\u2014the arms extending for hundreds of meters or more. When the water recedes, fishermen walk out to their nets to retrieve the catch. (It is their skill with using nets that is believed to give the Waghers their name, derived from the exclamation wah<\/em> and gher<\/em>, meaning \u201cwell laid out\u201d or \u201cwell surrounded\u201d in Kutchi.)<\/p>\n Even though it\u2019s the official fishing season and using a boat is permitted, Umar-bhai and his sons fish on foot. Owning a boat and living in a bunder is beyond their reach and that of many other villagers. So, most days, they commute to the coast, timing their arrival to match the departing tide.<\/p>\n After a half hour of walking, the sea begins to slosh around our ankles. The men stop and wait silently. We\u2019re just a little early. A lifetime of fishing in the area gives them a running sense of the tide, the ability to anticipate its progress by instinct, without resorting to charts and tables. Tomorrow, for instance, Umar-bhai says they\u2019ll start off from home a little later to account for the shift in the tide\u2019s timing. The water recedes farther and after about 10 minutes they walk on. Ankle-deep mud marks the beginning of the area they\u2019re interested in\u2014a still, shallow pool, more a sprawling puddle, really. But with fish trapped in it.<\/p>\n The trio unpacks a net, 60 or 70 meters long, and vanishes into the darkness. After about 15 minutes, torchlight is visible about 100 meters away, and the three men emerge, dragging the net from both ends and the middle. At the edge of the lagoon, one of them holds the sides of the net and makes a winnowing motion along the length so the entire catch accumulates in one writhing pile. Eels, an octopus, crabs with too little flesh, and a furiously flapping stingray are tossed aside. They place the prawns, blue crabs, and mullet in net pouches, to be sold to a fish trader in the village in the morning. Then they move on to another part of the seabed.<\/p>\n Many Wagher fishermen fish pagadiya<\/em>, on foot, using large nets deployed by hand in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Kutch. Photo by Sami Siva<\/p><\/div>\n For Umar-bhai, Kasam, and Husan, their commute to the coast has remained largely unchanged, although since the seabed was diked and converted to salt pans in the past few years, they now must travel about a kilometer farther to reach it. But other Wagher fishermen are not so lucky. A visible sign of this comes a few kilometers west, on the road between the villages of Luni and Sekhadiya. A concrete and barbed wire fence runs on and on alongside the road, interrupted at one place by a gate with a security checkpoint. There, a sign reads: \u201cEntry only for fishermen & devotee & darga,\u201d the latter two words referring to a shrine beyond. The sign marks a small victory for the fishermen amid troubles that began when they found themselves in the direct path of India\u2019s push toward industrial development (or, at least, a particularly aggressive manifestation of it).<\/p>\n To go by history, the Wagher fishers are doubly vulnerable to the changes happening around them. For one, from the Americas to Australia, things have seldom worked out well for indigenous fishers whose coastlines became part of larger designs. (Take the city of Mumbai, a few hundred kilometers south of the Kutch region. The British developed it into a trading port from the 17th century onward, and entire fishing villages belonging to its longtime inhabitants became landlocked as the city grew through reclamations from the sea.) And then, when settled and nomadic lifestyles have rubbed against each other, notions of land ownership and private property have routinely caused problems. As small-scale fishers who also happen to lead migratory lives, the Waghers are up against both tendencies.<\/p>\n The Waghers\u2019 home region of Kutch has become attractive for industrial development thanks to many of the same attributes that shape the lives of its people. The calm gulf and the large intertidal zone\u2014land that can easily be reclaimed from the sea\u2014are essential to the Waghers, but they also make the coast suitable for industrial ports. And proximity to the coast means an endless availability of seawater, useful for thermal power plants and other industry. As well, land with small and largely migratory populations is easier to acquire in large tracts, especially when the legal hold to land is tenuous at best.<\/p>\n This wave of industrialization along the Mundra coast started in the late 1990s, when the first port began operations amid reports of violations of industrial and coastal regulations. The port was partly run by a business conglomerate, the Adani Group. In 2005, the Indian government brought into law the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) Act with a view to attracting foreign investment. An industry in an SEZ was \u201cspecial\u201d in that it would enjoy tax and procedural incentives. A company with the requisite land and a recommendation from the state government could apply to develop an SEZ, and if approved they would prepare the land for use by industries and lease it to them at a profit. In 2006, the Indian government approved a proposal by the Adani Group to develop an area of 24 square kilometers in Mundra as an SEZ, which has since been expanded at regular intervals (along with equally regular accusations of it being a land-grab with state government collusion). The planned extent of the SEZ is now 150 square kilometers, with the land acquired from the limits of 14 villages in the Mundra area. Of this, 84.81 square kilometers have already been approved by the Indian government\u2014 and fenced off by the Adani Group\u2014as part of the SEZ. By 2013, the Mundra port\u2014the same one that lights the horizon off Umar-bhai\u2019s fishing grounds\u2014was the busiest of India\u2019s more than 200 ports.<\/p>\n In the shadow of one of the many power plants that dot the west coast of India, a woman goes about her work in a seasonal bunder. Wagher fishers have permanent villages inland, but live in simple structures on the coast during the fishing season. Photo by Sami Siva<\/p><\/div>\n The trouble for the Wagher fishers is that they do not have any legal claim to their bunders or to the paths they use to reach the sea. Their attempts over the decades to secure access to the coast have led nowhere\u2014likely because the Waghers are socially and economically marginalized, and invisible in the larger scheme of things. (Indeed, at least one report has an Adani Group spokesperson claiming in 2009 that there was no fishing activity on the coast, an assumption also found in Tata Power\u2019s environmental impact assessment for their power project in the SEZ.) Kiritsinh Jadeja, a Bhadreshwar village leader says, \u201cIt\u2019s the government\u2019s work to take care of the fishermen\u2019s rights.\u201d In his view though, the government is more easily persuaded to help industrialists, who have the advantage of what he calls \u201cmoney power.\u201d Besides, he says, the fishers lack formal education, the result of spending most of the year out on the bunders. This leaves them ill-equipped to comprehend government notifications, raise objections, and pursue legal redress. Usmangani Sherasiya, a longtime community worker in the area, points out that it doesn\u2019t help that the Wagher fishers in Mundra are Muslim. Political power is concentrated in the hands of Jains\u2014who by tradition are vehemently opposed to the taking of all life, and so tend to be disapproving of fishers\u2014and the Hindu Darbar community, neither of which is likely to represent the Waghers effectively. That leaves activists and nongovernmental organizations.<\/p>\n At the forefront of the battle for Wagher access to the shoreline is the trade union MASS, the Machimar Adhikar Sangharsh Sangathan (Association for the Struggle for Fishworkers\u2019 Rights). In 2007, for example, when the Adani Group began working on an airstrip near Shekadiya village that would block access to a pagadiya fishing zone, MASS protested for over a month in front of the block magistrate\u2019s office. The union finally backed down when fishers were granted an access road through the fenced-off land, though it was \u201caccess\u201d mediated by a gate and a security checkpoint.<\/p>\n For MASS and other critics, most disconcerting is the way land was acquired for the SEZ in the first place. The opposition in the Gujarat State Assembly and several journalists have accused the government of colluding in a land-grab by offering land at unusually low rates to the Adani Group. Environmental activists and fishers have suggested that the Adani Group submitted plans for approval that showed a high tideline up to 10 kilometers outside its actual position, with embankments being built to distort the high tideline. They\u2019ve also pointed out instances of dredging, seabed reclamation, mangrove destruction, flattened sand dunes, and blocked creeks, as well as the construction of large projects, including a township and a hospital, all without requisite permissions or in violation of regulations that protect coastal land. In response, the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests formed a committee to investigate. Their 2013 report confirmed several violations, and the ministry imposed a two-billion-rupee (about US $30-million) fine on the Adani Group. Independently, in January 2014, the Gujarat High Court deemed that its 2012 order to halt all construction and development work in the SEZ until environmental clearances had been approved was ignored. It ordered 12 operations in the SEZ to suspend work until the environment ministry gave its approval. The 2012 ruling was in response to a suit from 2011. The sequence is part of a cycle that\u2019s become all too familiar since the 1990s: violations, followed by fines and conditional clearances, followed by more violations. This time, approval was received in July 2014, subject to 21 conditions, including directives to set aside land for cultivating mangroves, not to modify the course of rivers, not to disturb sand dunes, and the somewhat optimistic order to restore affected creeks to the condition seen in satellite imagery from 2005.<\/p>\n The creeks are key resources for the Wagher fishers, and the court ruling was a response to a case filed by Gajendrasinh Jadeja, the sarpanch <\/em>(village council head) of Navinal village, which falls entirely within the SEZ. In his office, Jadeja opens up Google Maps on his laptop and shows how the fishers used to access the sea by walking one and a half kilometers to a creek and then taking their boats onward. Pagadiya fishermen harvested the area around the creek. Now, a wall blocks their path to the creek, and even if it didn\u2019t, bridges built on the creek would not allow boats to pass. Fishermen have to take a circuitous path of about 25 kilometers to reach their boats.<\/p>\n<\/a>
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